Final Class Blog

I have added my final class powerpoint presentation to my slideshare to view, http://www.slideshare.net/jlcheatham/social-media-marketing-final-presentation-15496039

Gen's Stat Summary

For this week's assignment, we just need to run stats on our personal sites.  I have 90 friends on Facebook, I have 7 followers on Twitter and 13 blog followers.  I have 235 blog pageviews to date.  The pageviews are mostly from the United States and use Internet Explorer to access my blog.  There are also pageviews from Russia, Germany, Indonesia, Malaysia, Sweden, Bolivia, Ireland, Netherlands and Turkey - - which is exciting to see.  As for my Twitter account and the blog, my followers are mostly classmates.  I did want to make note that I followed the Murrieta Patch and now they are following me!  Since this is just for class, I am not really comfortable that a newspaper is interested in my tweets.  If this was a twitter feed for my company, that would be fantastic!

My Time; My Investment

For our November 7 class, we learned about Return on Investment (ROI) for Social Media.  We learned about the company costs incurred for Social Media and about the difficulty involved in proving its ROI.  We also learned about reporting anayltics and the importance of it as well as using the 'old-fashioned' timeline process to overlay multiple social media platforms used at the same time.  This may prove to be the best way to gain a full picture of the company "promotion".

If I looked at my own blog as a business I would consider the blog very successful with 196 pageviews within the last month.  The VLOG, however, was not very successful.  I had a total of 29 VLOG views and the average view duration was only 81.5%, that means that out of 60 seconds, most viewers got bored after 45 seconds - - so my entire message was not viewed.  Another interesting measure was that 78.1% of the viewers were age 35-55 and 78% were female.  I was also able to derive that most of the VLOGs came directly from the YouTube watch page at 48.2% versus 37.9% from mobile devices and 13.7% from embedded websites such as Facebook.  Also, the most amount of pageviews for the VLOG were on the night that I actually posted the VLOG.  It would be interesting to research if that was due to Twitter, Facebook or the Blog itself.

So for purposes of my class being the "company", my future information would be released via Blog, would be written to target middle-aged females, and if I decided to release a timely VLOG I would cut the run time down to 30 seconds with the goal of - less is more!

Twitter Chat

Our Halloween Class Twitter Chat was interesting and fun!  We used the hash tag #smclass2012 for our discussion. I liked the quick bursts and bits of information exchanged in such a short period of time.  It was hard, though, to get used to using so few characters.  I had to modify my comments several times to stick to the 140 character limit.  I would have to agree with Mingyang that it was not convenient to type the hash tag at the end of every tweet.  Also, if you want to make your message to one or more specific individuals - additional character space is taken up!

Marketing with Video

Okay, I am forever "marketed" in Cyberspace.  I posted my first VLOG and the assignment was interesting.  The message was the easy part - - the presentation, not so much!  Check out my VLOG and see for yourself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzGoCM-9h2Q

Social Media - Multiple Angles

I enjoyed class last week.  We were split into groups and assigned the task of reviewing social media positioning for specific companies.  It was very interesting to hear reports from our classmates on how different companies approach social media.

Our group was assigned to review National Geographic.  That was a fun company to look at because it is so visual!  National Geographic, known for its iconic images and photographs, uses a combination of Facebook, MySpace, You Tube, Twitter, Flickr, Blogging and Widgets.  National Geographic had 11 million Facebook users and was quite popular with You Tube as well.  We were very surprised that National Geographic's presence on Flickr was quite boring and weak. 

What we gained from this exercise was the understanding that interlacing different social media platforms together would create a stronger marketing presence.  The consistent branding message would be more often and through multiple platforms go to a broader audience to gain higher visibility.

Learning Twitter

I am in the process of opening my own Twitter account.  I plan to follow UC Riverside, CNN, the Murrieta Patch, City of Murrieta, and Tradeshow Marketing.com.  I choose these organizations to follow for several reasons - for personal use, the education tweets; for CNN to keep me up-to-date on current news happenings around the Globe from a business perspective; the Murrieta Patch for local news to understand how the news could impact our business; City of Murrieta for personal - keep tabs on happenings in the City as it pertains to my dad and also how it pertains to our business; and lastly, Tradeshow Marketing for industry news - as I manage 25 tradeshows per year.

Branding Me

It is important to market myself to gain a reputation as the "go to source".  I need to establish myself as the expert leader.  I can do this in multiple ways - - using the same image of myself across multiple media platforms to establish consistency, as well as joining organizations, commenting on others' blog posts, posting my credentials and continued active participation in social media.

Yipee!  This is my first post.  I am taking a social media class to work on my marketing certificate through the University of California at Riverside.  After this class is finished I hope to be able to add my NEW social media skills to my repetoire - - bringing me into the current century!  Ha, ha!

Social Media is the exchange and sharing of news, information, ideas, thoughts, photos, videos and much more across multiple "social" networks or platforms.  Social networks are now more important than ever as consumers look to one another as the authority on companies and their products.

As a marketer I do know that the consumer now has a much more powerful voice than ever before and I need to learn to tap into and access this amazing marketing tool!